Brian Keenan, the Belfast-born lecturer who was imprisoned and tortured for four and a half years by Shia militants, has returned to Lebanon to film a documentary about his experience. Seventeen years after being released, the former hostage has revisited the suburbs of Beirut where he was abducted at the height of the country's destructive civil war.

The 56-year-old, who wrote a bestselling book, An Evil Cradling, about his captivity, gave a public reading and talk in the Lebanese capital about his ordeal.

Keenan was seized by Islamic Jihad gunmen on his way to his teaching job at the American University in Beirut in April 1986. Initially he was held in isolation and later moved to a series of underground dungeons where he was chained alongside another hostage, the British journalist John McCarthy.

At his reading in Beirut last weekend, Keenan recalled the violence he had endured at the hands of his captors.

"I often refer to my captivity as a holiday. I'm back for another holiday because I thought Lebanon owed me one," the Irish Times reported him as saying.

"I was nine months on my own in a tiny frigging little cell. The food was slid under the door, I was taken out for 10 minutes a day to go to the toilet and put back in again." One of his captors, Keenan remarked, had been a cruel and psychotic man who took pleasure in inflicting pain.

"If I had the capacity I would have slit his throat and smiled while doing it."

But he insisted he bore no animosity towards those who had imprisoned him or towards the Lebanese people. "I don't want revenge, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves everybody blind and unable to speak." He had been due to visit Lebanon last year but the trip was postponed after the outbreak in summer of the Israel-Hizbullah war.

Keenan's wife, Audrey, and his two sons, Cal and Jack, accompanied him on his three-week tour. The documentary is being made for BBC television.

Earlier this year Keenan had been active supporting calls for the freeing of the kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston who was held hostage by an Islamist group in Gaza.

He described in the Guardian the final "unreality of freedom" after "having spent months in a small room, most likely in the dark, having only the use of a radio for the intellectual stimulation that holds back your other companions for a short time - those being panic, anxiety, and fear so intense that you feel yourself suffocating, and you cannot do a thing about it."

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